We used to wait. (Chapter 27/?)
title: We used to wait. (Chapter 27/?)
author:
apodixis
spoilers: Through all seasons, though this takes place in an AU starting at the very end of season 2.
pairings: kara/lee, kara/sam
overall fic rating: R/NC-17
word count: 7,740
notes: See http://apodixis.livejournal.com/685.html for more information.
summary: If God isn't leading the fleet to Earth, can they ever find it?
The Colony: Five Years After the Cimtar Peace Accord
Samuel Anders walked down one of the hallways of what used to be the ship that housed him and the four other Earth-originating cylons he’d left the nuclear devastated planet alongside some two thousand years prior. Though they’d set out for the Twelve Colonies in a mission to warn their distant relatives about the dangers of creating and taking advantage of cylons-the humor wasn’t lost on him that he was technically one as well-they had arrived too late thanks to their sublight travel speeds. When they did make it there, a full out war was being fought across the twelve different planets, between the humans and their children, the cylon centurions. Fearing the worst, the five of them had done the only thing they could think to do, offer the centurions resurrection and flesh bodies to close the gap between the different species, in the hope that it would end the hatred and misunderstanding.
After peace had been reached, the centurions had left with the five of them, abandoning the Twelve Colonies to make a home for themselves. Out there, far removed from the humans, the cylons began to build off of the five’s ship, adding on slowly to expand outward. Now, it no longer resembled a ship at all, but something they called the Colony, in homage to the heritage they all shared that dated back to the departures from Kobol. Though the centurions often branched out further into the edges of the Colony, Sam and his friends found comfort within their original walls most often. Two thousand years was a long time after all, especially with only four others to pass the time with.
He stepped around the corner, passing by a series of artificially created waterfalls, something that acted not only to calm but carried the water-like fluid they all used to connect to the ship and other cylons with. When he found the room he was looking for, he headed in, though the sound of hushed voices unsettled him immediately. For a second, he considered lingering just out of sight and listening in to what was being said, but he opted for honesty, a policy that tended to work best. With a clearing of his throat, he made his presence known before he fully entered. Four sets of eyes looked back at him, though they weren’t the faces of Ellen and Saul, Tory and Galen.
Nearly two years after they’d formed the Colony, a transmission had come through the space and directly to their ship. They’d feared who it was from, that perhaps the humans were backing out of the peace treaty and had regrouped with a final solution to eradicate the problem they’d created. It hadn’t been the humans, though, at least not the ones from the Colonies. No, it had been another ship, similar to their own with matching Earth-based recognition codes. That had been something none of the five had ever imagined they’d see again and once the ship had docked with what was only the beginning of the Colony, the other space travelers had been welcomed on board.
“Something going on?” Sam asked, trying to keep casual.
The four exchanged looks and it was the red-haired woman who stood, speaking for them. She didn’t bother to beat around the bush, cutting to the chase was part of her very nature. “We’re leaving, Sam,” she said, though there was regret in her tone.
“Leaving?” He questioned in a small voice, as though the word was foreign to him. “To go to where?”
She settled her hands on her hips. “The Twelve Colonies.”
Their abandonment hurt for a number of reasons, but he kept himself steeled and together. “We aren’t done here, Eugenia. We just brought the first One online not even a few months ago.”
Across the way, she shook her head and her sister stood up beside her, hand lightly touching at Eugenia’s arm as a sign of solidarity. They’d made the decision together and they would stand together. “He’s why we’re going,” Cleo offered in a softer tone.
“If we’d arrived here earlier, we wouldn’t have let you make the agreement you made with the centurions. We aren’t God, we shouldn’t have the power to make people however we want. And if we do, we shouldn’t be programming them the way Ellen has the One,” Eugenia spoke up again, stern and tense. “Her father wasn’t a good man, why should we be starting them off with so many flaws already?”
“We’ll talk to Ellen then, reprogram him-”
“No,” another voice said aloud and Dreilide stood up beside the two women that had been his companions for thousands of years. “She won’t listen, we’ve already made our arguments to her. Ellen thinks she can change him like she wished she could have changed her father, but she can’t.” It was clear that the decision they’d finally come to had been one they’d mulled over for quite some time and was only reached through great pain. They didn’t want to go, but their hand was being forced.
“We know you’re going to continue on without us,” said the final member of the other group, Jacob. “We wish you wouldn’t, but we can’t stop you at this point. We can’t stop you but we won’t abide by it either. That’s why we’re going.”
Sam felt as though he was being blindsided by their decision and it was clear, nothing he could say would make them change their mind. They were determined. “Just talk to everyone else about this before you go.”
“It’s going to end in bloodshed, Samuel,” Eugenia said, her words softer, like saying it too loud would make the possibility even more real. “Worse than before. Worse than what we saw on Earth. There’s billions of people here. It’ll be like it was for us. They’ll never be happy with what they have until they take everything away from everyone else.”
“They have God-they gave their one God to us.”
She shook her head, red hair moving with her. “God or Gods, it’s never enough. You can believe what you want and still make excuses and reasons to not follow the rules. They’re meant to be broken, and that One, he’s going to lead the way.”
The four collectively began to file out of the room, Jacob first without a word, though Dreilide and Cleo came to stop beside Sam before they left.
“The Twos we’ve been working on together,” Cleo started, “…they’re done. If you could make sure he gets online, since I don’t think Ellen and Tory will let you scrap the line entirely, we’d be grateful.”
Sam nodded. “Just the way he is?”
Cleo glanced to Dreilide and they both raised their heads to nod in unison.
“We named the first one Leoben,” Dreilide said, and with that, they both stepped out of the room.
Nearly alone, Sam raised his eyes to look towards Eugenia. For two thousand years, he’d been alongside Saul and Ellen, Galen and Tyrol, having lost the woman he loved in the attacks on Earth. Though they’d been expecting it, and that was why the five of them had worked together in secret to restore the lost art of resurrection, the destruction had come far earlier than they’d planned for. He hadn’t yet found the time to start the process of creating bodies and a download signature for his significant other. She was gone. Eugenia, though, had been something of a surprise to him. For the last few years, he had found comfort in her, and though they’d never said it out loud, he was sure she felt the love for him that he felt for her. Their leaving hurt, but her going in particular was what stung him the worst.
“I’m sorry,” she offered and stepped nearer to him. “You should come with us. Even if it goes to hell out here, we can be normal for a little while.”
Sam considered it for a moment, but shook his head in the end. He loved her, but he couldn’t leave behind the others that had been his friends even before his first death. “I belong here.”
Hurt spread over her eyes and her features. She understood his loyalty, but couldn’t understand his misguided belief in what they were doing. Eugenia didn’t want to leave him, but she would. “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime.”
He forced a smile and nodded to her, his hand seeking out hers to squeeze it. “Maybe.”
She moved in, her tall and lean frame meaning she barely had to tilt her head up to press her lips against his, but it was short lived before she pulled back. If she allowed it to go any further, she was sure she wouldn’t go. “Be careful. I’ll see you on the other side, Samuel.”
“I’ll see you on the other side.”
-
Galactica, Orbiting Earth: Present
“Wait-wait! Please, I need to know first. Do you have Kara Thrace on board?”
It was as if the entire CIC collectively froze and set their eyes upon her. Kara’s insides cramped up at the response, sweat at her brow over the implications of what it could mean. With the type of day they had, she was fairing poorly enough, but to add onto it that an unknown ship they’d never heard of before, and seemingly not cylon in origin, had shown up and was now asking for her by name? No, it was too much.
She looked to Lee in a panic, finding it hard to breathe. It was like that day on Pegasus all over again, when the cylons had returned and she’d given in to her emotions and been unable to cope. Kara wanted to reach for Lee more than anything, he’d become a crutch for her as of late, but she felt guilt at it. He wasn’t hers anymore and she had made that decision herself once again. Her fingers curled over the edge of the table in the center of CIC to try to force her dizziness to subside, her eyes falling to the illuminated surface instead of everyone else around her.
Lee set his hand low on the small of Kara’s back and looked to his father. They had two ways of playing this. They could either admit the woman was here and hope that the other ship meant them no harm, but that also ran the risk of them having to hand Kara on over to them. The other option was to deny, deny, deny, with the risk that without having her on board, the ship wouldn’t simply blow them out of the sky. It was the Admiral’s call, but Lee pleaded with his eyes to his father. No, they said, please don’t make me give her up. His father knew none of what had happened down on Earth and Lee was having a hard time himself trying to fully make sense of it. They hadn’t stopped moving for the last few hours and his brain would need quite some time to come to terms. All he knew right now, though, was that he didn’t want to let her go, whatever she was.
Adama, still holding the comm in his hand, looked over to his daughter and his son, his eyes locked especially on the hand Lee held gently to her. It warmed and broke his heart just the same. Not only could Adama not give Kara up as a sacrifice for himself and the rest of the fleet, but he knew if he was forced to do so, Lee would be going with her this time. He covered over the mouthpiece of the phone and redirected his attention to Tigh. “Are the civilian ships ready to jump away?”
Tigh gave a solemn shake of his head. “Most of them, but Colonial One and Rising Star are reporting FTL problems and are trying to repair them right now.”
Laura had returned to her own ship after some of the events of the day to prepare for how to deal with the civilians in regards to all that had happened. He hadn’t wanted to see her go, especially not with how very sick she’d been as of late, but Roslin tended to do what she wanted. Now, if they left, he would have to leave her behind and like his decision about Kara, he wouldn’t do that. He’d rather go down fighting. He raised the comm to his mouth again before speaking.
“I am not aware that we have a woman by that name on any of our ships,” he lied, eyes on Kara the entire time.
There was silence on the other line and Dee instinctively checked to make sure the connection was still open. It was.
“Admiral,” the man said, frustration evident. “The fact that you are here right now tells me she’s with you.”
Kara looked over to Adama, chewing over her lower lip.
“You’ve still not identified yourself, Meridian. Who am I speaking with and where is your ship from?”
“This isn’t how it works. I need to speak to her first.”
“No, I’ll tell you how it works. You tell me who you are and why you’re looking for this person and I won’t continue to arm my nuclear warheads and aim them straight at your ship.” Adama raised his hand towards one of the crewmen, the one who had the important but rarely used job of being in constant control over the small supply of nukes they had left. The stand-off would begin. With any luck, the other ship’s radiological alarms, if they even had them, would be sounding now, letting them know just how serious things were. Bill looked to Tigh for a status update on the other ships, but his expression said it all. They needed to buy time.
“The Meridian is a science ship with a crew of twenty-three. We mean you no harm,” the voice reassured him, but it did little to calm the Admiral. “I know that if you’re here, it means something happened to the Twelve Colonies and you’re looking for Earth. I know that you found it and it isn’t what you expected, and this ship and myself, are your only hope of ever finding out what happened here. I also know my daughter is aboard one of your ships and brought you here. Now I need you to start trusting me and find her… I need to know she’s okay.”
Kara looked to the Admiral, shaking her head immediately in response to what the voice had claimed. “No, he’s lying. My father’s dead, we need to leave!” She insisted in a panic. “He died on Caprica with everyone else.” Only then did she think back to the copies of herself left burning in a field down on the planet below. Maybe she didn’t even have parents, maybe she had been given a story like all the others and only believed it to be real. Gods, why would someone have programmed her with the kind of childhood she had? Was it some kind of cruel cosmic joke? She thought about the things she could be sure of in her life. Zak, everything that started with Zak, she could be certain of. He had friends and family, most of which were standing around her right now, that knew her back then. Lee by default was her anchor now, because she had met him all those years ago, the only living person around her that truly knew she had existed back then.
“What is your name?” Adama asked.
“Dreilide. Dreilide Thrace.”
She shook her head again, brows furrowed in her pained expression as she watched the Admiral. All she had wanted her entire life was to hear her father’s voice again, to have him back in her life, to just have him tell her that he really had loved her and the words hadn’t been made empty with his departure. But this, she couldn’t believe. There was no way.
“Please,” the ominous voice pleaded.
Kara reached her hand out for the comm Adama held, and with hesitation, he finally handed it over. She swallowed hard, finding her mouth dry and her throat aching from the screaming she’d done earlier in the day. “This is Major Kara Thrace.”
“My God,” the voice lost all sense of control it held before. “Kara, I’ve waited for years.”
“You’re not my father,” she said, ignoring his own words. “He died on Caprica when the cylons attacked.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“There’s no way for him to be here. Stop lying to us, do you know what we’ve been through?” She asked, the pain of the last few years coming out as she spoke.
“Kara, I know things don’t make sense right now, but they will. We’ve been sent here to wait for you, for all of you, and offer you passage to safety should you ever arrive.” He stopped, presumably allowing time for his words to sink in to all those who listened. “Whatever your terms are, my team and I want to come on board and speak to you and your Admiral and whoever else is in charge.”
As many hang ups as she had regarding her parentage, or perhaps even lack thereof if it turned out it had all been fabricated, it wasn’t her call to make regarding the future of what remained of the human race. She wasn’t the Admiral or the President, she wasn’t even Commander anymore. Kara limply offered the phone back to the Admiral, overwhelmed and fading fast.
“This is the Admiral,” Adama said to clarify, as if her voice and his could ever be mistaken for one another’s. “Your ship is to remain where it is. We will send over a shuttle to pick you and a few others up. When it arrives, you’ll allow my people to search you and any belongings you intend to bring on board. If my people don’t check in as I dictate, we will fire upon your ship. Do you understand and agree?”
“We agree.”
-
Though what everyone really wanted to do was get some sleep, it didn’t seem like they would be lying down for that comfort anytime soon. Preparing the Raptor and its pilots and marine guards going on board had taken the better part of an hour once they’d gone through every precaution and regulation to be observed. Though it was clear the people on the ship weren’t outright associated with their enemy cylons, they knew it could very well be a trap. One couldn’t simply trust voices anymore. Though the person on the other end they’d talked to hadn’t sounded like any of the male cylons they knew, it wasn’t enough to believe it for fact. Then there were all the questions about who these people were if they indeed weren’t enemy cylon and weren’t from the Twelve Colonies. Were they what remained of the people from Earth or did they come from somewhere else entirely? All those questions and more meant that every protocol that had ever been written would be observed. There would be no mistakes or sloppiness tonight.
Laura stood alongside Bill, their contingent of marines behind them and ready to expect the worst. What they’d heard from Racetrack over the wireless had indicated no problems at all, and she hadn’t given the sly verbal signal worked out ahead of time to indicate any duress, but that didn’t mean all was well. Adama watched the cockpit, seeing the two pilots still bundled up in their flight suits and not reading any kind of additional stress in their body language. The guns of the marines around him raised as the door of the ship opened up, revealing the occupants inside. The Raptor had left with four people and now returned with seven, two women and a man, whom he assumed to be the one all communication had been done with over the phone. There was something about the women that unsettled him, something oddly familiar, though he couldn’t exactly place it and let it go.
The three of them climbed from the wing of the Raptor unsteadily, clearly the first time any of them had been on a vessel of that sort. They made no move to to approach those who waited for them, wisely choosing to keep back and speak when spoken to. Dreilide’s eyes took in his surroundings first, then shifted ahead to the sea of unfamiliar faces.
Roslin did her duty as ambassador, stepping forward and raising her hand weakly. “I’m Laura Roslin, President of the Colonies,” she said, and there was recognition of her position and power in the faces of the three guests. Each of them took her hand in turn, returning the gesture.
“Dreilide Thrace,” the man said. Though Roslin had heard all about what had happened, she still found it hard to believe what he claimed. Not only were the circumstances absolutely ridiculous, but he looked hardly older than Kara himself.
“Eugenia Odila,” the red haired woman said before gesturing to the third member of their party. “My sister, Cleo.”
Dreilide looked past the President to the man he could recognize as Admiral by his uniform and the pins at his collar. That had been something Socrata had taught him all those years ago. “Admiral, sir,” he started, his own hand raising preemptively in a casual greeting to the man before him.
Adama nodded his head and shook his hand, but didn’t bother to address him. The entire situation reeked and he had the feeling there were a lot of things they didn’t yet know. “We’ve prepared a place to talk.”
Dreilide nodded along with his companions, following the President and Admiral as they led the way. The marines that surrounded them didn’t do anything to make him feel any better, but it brought him an odd kind of comfort he hadn’t felt in decades now. One of the guards was female, her ponytail hanging out from underneath her helmet, and his brain immediately processed for what he wanted to see, thinking it blonde when in reality it was a deep brown shade. He’d hoped to see Kara standing on the deck when he arrived, though he had the sudden realization that he probably wouldn’t have even recognized her if she had been there. The last time he’d seen her in person, she’d been nothing but a child, and all the photographs he had of her preserved her that way. Now she was an adult, a woman, a completely different person from that he had left. She could have been a wife now, a mother, a million things, but the most important and significant of it all was that she was actually alive.
They arrived in a conference room, old and fairly empty. They weren’t the only ones there though, and this time, Dreilide instantly recognized the face in front of him. It was Saul Tigh, aged much further than he’d ever seen him, even during the years they’d spent together in the Colony. Like that night in the bar in Delphi, he wanted to go up to the man and greet him, but he knew just as it was back then, Saul didn’t recognize him. Beside him, Eugenia touched his arm as she found her eyes on their old friend as well, unable to believe that somehow, despite all that had clearly happened back in the Colonies, one of their acquaintances had made it through in the end.
With the exception of the marines, everyone sat at the table, though on opposite sides to clearly demonstrate the separation that existed between the two.
“I’m afraid we can’t offer you anything other than water,” Adama said.
“No, we’re all right.” Eugenia was speaking for the group. She couldn’t imagine what a fleet of this size was subsisting on and wasn’t truly interested in finding out. She turned her attention to Saul Tigh, seated directly across from her. “Do you really not know who we are?”
Her question startled him and he looked back to Bill as if searching for help in answering the question. “No. Should I?”
She nodded to him and leaned back in her chair. Though Dreilide had attested to this over two decades ago, seeing it for herself was something else. “You should, Saul. You should.”
“I didn’t tell you my name,” he said.
Dreilide answered for her. “You did, a long time ago.” He left it at that. There would be a time to get into it, but this second had more pressing matters. “We’ll answer whatever questions you have for us, Admiral, President, but I want to request I see Kara first.”
It was something they expected to be asked of, though they’d hoped for the best and sent Kara and Lee away from the deck on the off chance that they could prevent her from being pulled into it. “What reason do we have to trust that you are who you say you are?”
“I can tell she means a lot to you by the way you’re looking to protect her, but she’s going to want to hear everything we have to say here,” he said.
“Bill,” Laura prompted from beside him and he acquiesced.
With a look from the Admiral towards a marine at a door at the back of the room, the soldier knocked twice before opening the hatch. Dreilide watched in rapt attention for whomever would come through it, but it wasn’t his daughter, in fact it was a man with cropped brown hair and striking blue eyes. His face and body were stiff, and his expression alone made Dreilide uneasy to be in his presence. The man stepped aside, however, and a woman of similar height in an identical blue uniform came through behind him. Though he’d feared that he wouldn’t recognize her if she was standing in front of him, Dreilide knew her instantly. Without question, the woman with long blonde hair that reminded him so very much of his wife’s, was his daughter. This was Kara Thrace, finally grown up.
He’d dreamt of a reunion between him and her since the day he left her behind. In all of them, she was happy to see him and never angry. She would fit into his arms just like she did when she was a child and it would be like no time had passed. Kara would tell him about the life she had led in his absence, and though each time her life’s work changed, she was always happy. Her mother had done right by her despite the wrongs he’d committed against them both. Kara never stopped smiling in those idealic thoughts.
The reality of the confrontation was much different. She looked less like her mother than he thought she would, and in her features, he could read parts of himself. There wasn’t a smile over her lips, her expression kept tight and terse, and that part of her was definitely all Socrata. So she’d fallen into the military just like her mother, he shouldn’t have been surprised at it, but he was, regardless. Kara crossed the room and the man she was with followed beside her. She was doing her best to avoid looking directly at him, succeeding until she and the man sat down, with Kara sitting directly beside the Admiral and thus, nearly straight across from him. Their eyes met and he saw recognition flicker in her eyes, her steadiness faltering for a moment.
As much as she wanted to deny that this man wasn’t her father, she couldn’t. Maybe he was a copy or a trick, but he was a damn good one at that. He was exactly as she’d remembered, exactly as she’d last seen him in some of her photographs from the happier years of her childhood. The idea that time had preserved him perfectly was actually what bothered her the most, and before anyone else could get a word in, she opened her mouth to speak. “How are you here?” She asked, her voice betraying nothing.
Dreilide kept his eyes locked on his daughter’s own, another part he knew to be from Socrata and not from him. Her voice had expectedly changed too, no longer the high pitched sound he could still hear in his ears from years past. “I can’t answer that question without bringing up a million more. We need to start at the beginning.”
Adama reached forward to the sole object in the middle of the table, a device presumably used for recording. He hit a single button and nodded across the table to the unknown visitors.
“Two thousand years ago, our planet was nearly destroyed, along with the people on it. We created sentient lifeforms, like the ones you call cylons, and they rebelled against us. You’ve seen it, you know the devastation down there.”
“How did you survive?” Laura asked.
The woman known as Cleo spoke up, the first time since she arrived. “We felt the threat was coming and it was only a matter of time before the cylons finally and fully retaliated. As a result, different groups began to work on redeveloping resurrection technology-”
Adama stopped her. “We tested the remains of the people down on that planet. We know they were cylons.”
She nodded hesitantly, as if afraid of continuing. “When the Thirteenth Tribe left Kobol, our tribe was composed of humanoid cylons. Our ancestors left to find a place for themselves and they found the planet they named Earth. Back then, the only means of survival of our species was by resurrection. They designed new personalities and new bodies, created new people and gave them life to join the rest of us. A miracle happened along the way though, and they found that some couples were beginning to show signs of being able to reproduce organically. No longer was there a need for resurrection. We could finally have children like humans did, form our own families and take care of our own. We aged just like everyone else, and for the first time, everyone embraced the idea of death instead of looking to cheat it. They didn’t want to be cylons anymore, so they chose not to be.”
Dreilide took over when Cleo finished, trying to answer the original question posed to them. “We are cylons,” he admitted outright with his eyes on his daughter, showing he had no shame for what he was. “But I was born to a mother and a father, and they were born to parents, and theirs had parents as well. I was a baby, a child, I grew up. How does that make me any different than you? Because over two thousand years before I was born, your ancestors created mine, that means my people are less than you?” He wasn’t accusing them, as no one had even made a remark of that nature. At least not yet. He wasn’t fighting just for himself either, but also for his daughter to understand the nature of her heritage.
“You’re not dead though,” Roslin said. “You should be and you’re not.”
He nodded in acknowledgement. “I was part of one group that worked in bringing back resurrection as a means of survival for my people. It was a way to cheat death, but only done out of fear that we would cease to exist if our own cylons had their way. The destruction came earlier than we expected, though, and the facilities we were beginning to set up underground and out in space weren’t prepared to to take the downloads of millions. Only a little over over fifteen thousand were saved.” Though it had happened two millenia ago, the pain of everything and everyone lost in a single day was still fresh inside of him.
“You just had bodies lying around for everyone that would potentially need one?” Tigh asked.
“No, the technology we created was different than what you did.”
Tigh’s eye widened. “What?”
Eugenia shook her head and filled in the missing information. “You, Ellen and a few others were another group that were working on resurrection at the same time. Your idea went back to what we had when we left Kobol. Standard bodies that could accept preprogrammed personalities. The idea works, so long as you’ve already built a vessel to hold the person you need to put into it, but when you have millions of people who have been interbred for thousands of years, you don’t have a chance at saving everyone.”
“Ellen? My Ellen?”
“And Samuel, Galen, and Tory,” she finished. “But you wouldn’t remember them.”
“Eugenia, is it?” Laura said. “All of them, everyone you mentioned, they’re here on Galactica.”
Something flared in all three of the unknown guests at that mention. Billions of people had died and yet, the five people they’d spent years with back in the Colony had survived in the end. The chances of it were astronomical and unbelievable, and yet it had happened. “Do they remember anything?” Eugenia asked.
Tigh, being one of the five, took the time to answer for those absent. “No. Down on Earth, some of us remembered things about being there, but that’s it. We still don’t know anything about who we are or why we don’t remember.”
She thought of Sam immediately, though the knowledge that he wouldn’t be able to remember her face left an ache inside of her before she put herself back on task. She looked to her sister and then to Dreilide before looking across the table again. “Can we see them?”
“After we get finished here,” the Admiral said, still not ready to trust them. “How did you get to the Colonies?”
“The plan that our government had only begun to put into place before the attacks dictated that the survivors would move on to find a new home together. Some began to think that we owed it to the other tribes to go out and search of them, to find you and warn you about our mistakes so you didn’t suffer the same fate. They asked for volunteers and we, along with another man we left on our ship, Jacob, decided we would go. We followed the accounts we had of the Thirteenth Tribe leaving Kobol back to that planet and then started in the direction we knew the other tribes had left. Along the way, we realized we were following a fading heat signature of another ship, and only when we got to the Colonies, were we able to actually follow it to its end.”
“What did you find?” Tigh asked.
“You,” said Dreilide. “We didn’t have FTL technology when we left Earth, so we were forced to travel at sublight speeds the entire way. We arrived almost two years after another ship from Earth, and that ship was yours. The five of you, falsely assuming you were the only ones to make it off of Earth, headed back to find the other Twelve Tribes with the same intentions we had. You got there first, in the middle of the first cylon war in fact, and you and Ellen offered the centurions human-like bodies and resurrection in exchange for peace.” The more he talked about it, the more a small amount of anger seemed to come off of him.
Adama seemed to be hit the hardest by the revelation of what had really gone on those some fourty years ago. “No one ever really knew why the cylons left a war they seemed to be winning.”
Next to him, Tigh felt a stirring of guilt over something he had done. Something he had done that he couldn’t even remember. It was clear that whoever he had been before had good intentions behind what they did, but the consequences of it all had been even worse than what they tried to prevent.
“You and the centurions formed what you called the Colony and there, you’d already started the work of giving them resurrection. You were just beginning the process of creating new human looking cylons, a total of eight models.”
“Eight?” Roslin asked. “We’ve only ever seen seven, but we know them by their numbers. We have an Eight on board.”
“You have an Eight here?” Cleo asked.
“Yes, she defected to our side at the start of the attacks,” the President continued, leaving out the larger facts of Sharon Agathon’s life.
“The Eight was Galen’s,” Eugenia said. “We didn’t agree with what they were trying to do, but for awhile we agreed to help because the four of us didn’t know where else to go. Together, we laid out the ground work for who the other models would be and some of us chose to work on specific ones. Ellen made the Ones first, in the image of her father. Dreilide and Cleo made the Twos.”
Something horrifying awakened in both Kara’s face and the man that sat beside her. Dreilide wasn’t one to miss it, but he chose not to bring it up in the middle of the conference room.
“Samuel was working on the Sixes, myself the Threes,” she continued on. “You don’t happen to have photographs of them, do you?” It wasn’t necessary, but the curiosity of a proud parent inside her longed to see how their children had wound up in the end, especially after the four of them had abandoned their work.
“I’ll get them,” Lee said and stood to leave, but not before laying his hand against Kara’s shoulder, a sign of affection her father caught. He was only gone a minute before he returned, a folder in hand. Lee slid a few slips of paper across the table top and the three arranged them all in a row before them, putting them into their number orders as if that made it easier to process. Where number seven should have been, they left an empty space.
“You’ve never heard of a seventh model?” Dreilide asked and those across from him shook their heads.
“Up until this conversation, we just assumed one of us was the seventh,” Tigh clarified.
Eugenia kept her eyes on the photograph of the six model, unable to shake the image she saw. When she left the Colony with the others, Sam had only just begun work on programming the Sixth model. Who she would really be, what she would look like, none of that had been fleshed out yet. Staring at the photograph though, Eugenia saw similarities between her and the model that were far too many to just be a coincidence. She’d left Sam and he’d made that Six in something of her image. They couldn’t be mistaken for the same person, he hadn’t gotten her down that well, but to suggest that they were sisters wouldn’t have surprised anyone. She pushed the picture back into place.
“What we dont know,” Dreilide began, “Is what happened in the Colony after we left.”
Tigh’s single eye focused on him. “Why would you leave?”
“Because we’d gotten in too deep. We never agreed with what you did, and after Ellen brought the One online, we knew nothing good could come of it all. He could be helpful and kind, but there was something else underneath it all that we didn’t trust. She wouldn’t scrap him or rewrite him, and instead she started allowing him to help program the other models. When we left, we told all of you about what we feared would happen, that they wouldn’t ever be content where they were and they’d come back to the Colonies to take what they felt was theirs.”
“How do I fit into all of this?” Kara spoke, the first thing she’d said aloud since her initial question.
“We left the Colony, the four of us,” her father said, the pair of sisters allowing him to take the question. “All we wanted was to just disappear and find something for ourselves. I stayed on Caprica because of how much I saw Earth in it. I didn’t have anything when I got there, it wasn’t like there was work for a scientist who’d spent two thousand years perfecting resurrection technology for a non-human race of people.” His lips lifted into something of a smile, but his daughter stiffly didn’t return it. “So I did what I always wanted to do back on Earth. I played piano. Things were… simpler. I met your mother a few years after I’d been on Caprica, Kara.” Though there were others in the room, he spoke only to her. “On Earth, I’d never been married, I didn’t lose anyone other than my family when everything was destroyed. She was the only woman I’ve ever loved.”
Kara was torn about how to feel about the man in front of her. He was both familiar and not. Though he talked about things from her life, like the mother she sometimes wished she could forget, she still had a hard time believing that he was who he was saying he was. Worse, was that every word he said only confirmed things further for her. She wasn’t human. She was half-cylon, the first of her kind. She’d never been anything but half machine. She’d spent her life praying to the Gods, but had they ignored her pleas because she didn’t have a soul? Could someone have half of one? Did having a human mother grant her one just the same?
“We got married and after a few years, we had you. I never thought that we would be able-” he said, stopping himself as the emotion behind his daughter’s conception and birth came back to him. He kept himself together though, and continued on. “Human and cylon having a child together, that had never even been something anyone ever dreamt of, Kara. I don’t care what anyone believes, you existing at all is a miracle. The fact that you survived and you brought everyone here, only further proves it to me.”
“Stop,” she ordered him like he was one of her nuggets. “I’m not whatever you are. I’m not.” Though she’d seen evidence that confirmed his words, she didn’t want to believe it. She’d witnessed her own body laid out before her, twice, and now the appearance of her father on the other side of the universe, looking like hardly a day had passed since she’d seen him twenty years earlier, and yet she wanted to live in denial.
Dreilide silenced himself. Staring at his daughter was like seeing Socrata come to life all over again. The mannerisms they shared was absolutely uncanny.
Bill looked to the woman he considered his daughter beside him, the daughter he was realizing actually had a father of her own. He felt jealousy brewing inside at the notion that this man could simply find them, quite literally in the middle of nowhere, and expect to be able to claim Kara as his own. As for what Dreilide was saying and the implications it made for what Kara truly was, he was surprised at how little it bothered him in the end. Maybe in a clearer head, he wouldn’t feel the same, but sitting next to her at that table, she was his daughter and nothing less. “How did you get out here then, if you were on Caprica?”
Kara’s father took his eyes off of her reluctantly, looking back to the Admiral. He swallowed and nodded, returning his focus. “I saw Saul and Ellen Tigh one day on Caprica, but when I approached them, they didn’t know me. I knew that as much as I disagreed with their decisions, they would never have allowed copies to be made of themselves or chosen to wipe their own memories. What it meant was that the Colony no longer belonged to them any longer and it would only be a matter of time before the centurions and whoever was leading them came back.”
“When we all split up,” Eugenia began,”we agreed that if something should ever happen and we became aware of it, we would begin the journey back towards Earth and where we knew our people had headed.”
Roslin’s head shook vehemently. “How could you just leave everyone to die? Why didn’t you warn us?”
“And say what?” Eugenia bit out. “Who would believe us? If they even were able to confirm that we weren’t human in nature, they’d just accuse us of being the enemy. We didn’t have any idea of what the cylons were planning, just that they could be planning something. We weren’t left with a lot of choices.”
“So you just left billions to die with nowhere to go?” She accused the three cylons.
“No,” Dreilide responded with some of his own rage. “I left you my daughter. Do you know how much it killed me to leave her behind? I left her so you would have a chance of making it here some day. And she did it, didn’t she? Tell me she isn’t the reason you found Earth.” His voice raised and he was only a shadow of the soft spoken man he’d been a moment before. Everyone sat in silence and as the seconds passed, Dreilide began to feel regretful over the attitude he’d taken with them.
“Maybe it’s time we take a break,” Lee said, eyes shifting to search over each and every face around him. Though he had concern for his father and Roslin, his biggest worry was what was working through Kara after all the revelations of the day.
Adama deferred to his son’s judgement and stood from his seat. “We’ll reconvene in the morning.”
Kara was the first person to rush out of the room, like there was a fire behind her she was fleeing from. Dreilide felt physical pain at her absence and the touch to his arm by Cleo brought him back.
“Give her time, Dreilide.”
He didn’t respond to her, his vision instead lingering on the doorway she’d left through until the marines led them out and to their quarters for the night.
author:
apodixis
spoilers: Through all seasons, though this takes place in an AU starting at the very end of season 2.
pairings: kara/lee, kara/sam
overall fic rating: R/NC-17
word count: 7,740
notes: See http://apodixis.livejournal.com/685.html for more information.
summary: If God isn't leading the fleet to Earth, can they ever find it?
The Colony: Five Years After the Cimtar Peace Accord
Samuel Anders walked down one of the hallways of what used to be the ship that housed him and the four other Earth-originating cylons he’d left the nuclear devastated planet alongside some two thousand years prior. Though they’d set out for the Twelve Colonies in a mission to warn their distant relatives about the dangers of creating and taking advantage of cylons-the humor wasn’t lost on him that he was technically one as well-they had arrived too late thanks to their sublight travel speeds. When they did make it there, a full out war was being fought across the twelve different planets, between the humans and their children, the cylon centurions. Fearing the worst, the five of them had done the only thing they could think to do, offer the centurions resurrection and flesh bodies to close the gap between the different species, in the hope that it would end the hatred and misunderstanding.
After peace had been reached, the centurions had left with the five of them, abandoning the Twelve Colonies to make a home for themselves. Out there, far removed from the humans, the cylons began to build off of the five’s ship, adding on slowly to expand outward. Now, it no longer resembled a ship at all, but something they called the Colony, in homage to the heritage they all shared that dated back to the departures from Kobol. Though the centurions often branched out further into the edges of the Colony, Sam and his friends found comfort within their original walls most often. Two thousand years was a long time after all, especially with only four others to pass the time with.
He stepped around the corner, passing by a series of artificially created waterfalls, something that acted not only to calm but carried the water-like fluid they all used to connect to the ship and other cylons with. When he found the room he was looking for, he headed in, though the sound of hushed voices unsettled him immediately. For a second, he considered lingering just out of sight and listening in to what was being said, but he opted for honesty, a policy that tended to work best. With a clearing of his throat, he made his presence known before he fully entered. Four sets of eyes looked back at him, though they weren’t the faces of Ellen and Saul, Tory and Galen.
Nearly two years after they’d formed the Colony, a transmission had come through the space and directly to their ship. They’d feared who it was from, that perhaps the humans were backing out of the peace treaty and had regrouped with a final solution to eradicate the problem they’d created. It hadn’t been the humans, though, at least not the ones from the Colonies. No, it had been another ship, similar to their own with matching Earth-based recognition codes. That had been something none of the five had ever imagined they’d see again and once the ship had docked with what was only the beginning of the Colony, the other space travelers had been welcomed on board.
“Something going on?” Sam asked, trying to keep casual.
The four exchanged looks and it was the red-haired woman who stood, speaking for them. She didn’t bother to beat around the bush, cutting to the chase was part of her very nature. “We’re leaving, Sam,” she said, though there was regret in her tone.
“Leaving?” He questioned in a small voice, as though the word was foreign to him. “To go to where?”
She settled her hands on her hips. “The Twelve Colonies.”
Their abandonment hurt for a number of reasons, but he kept himself steeled and together. “We aren’t done here, Eugenia. We just brought the first One online not even a few months ago.”
Across the way, she shook her head and her sister stood up beside her, hand lightly touching at Eugenia’s arm as a sign of solidarity. They’d made the decision together and they would stand together. “He’s why we’re going,” Cleo offered in a softer tone.
“If we’d arrived here earlier, we wouldn’t have let you make the agreement you made with the centurions. We aren’t God, we shouldn’t have the power to make people however we want. And if we do, we shouldn’t be programming them the way Ellen has the One,” Eugenia spoke up again, stern and tense. “Her father wasn’t a good man, why should we be starting them off with so many flaws already?”
“We’ll talk to Ellen then, reprogram him-”
“No,” another voice said aloud and Dreilide stood up beside the two women that had been his companions for thousands of years. “She won’t listen, we’ve already made our arguments to her. Ellen thinks she can change him like she wished she could have changed her father, but she can’t.” It was clear that the decision they’d finally come to had been one they’d mulled over for quite some time and was only reached through great pain. They didn’t want to go, but their hand was being forced.
“We know you’re going to continue on without us,” said the final member of the other group, Jacob. “We wish you wouldn’t, but we can’t stop you at this point. We can’t stop you but we won’t abide by it either. That’s why we’re going.”
Sam felt as though he was being blindsided by their decision and it was clear, nothing he could say would make them change their mind. They were determined. “Just talk to everyone else about this before you go.”
“It’s going to end in bloodshed, Samuel,” Eugenia said, her words softer, like saying it too loud would make the possibility even more real. “Worse than before. Worse than what we saw on Earth. There’s billions of people here. It’ll be like it was for us. They’ll never be happy with what they have until they take everything away from everyone else.”
“They have God-they gave their one God to us.”
She shook her head, red hair moving with her. “God or Gods, it’s never enough. You can believe what you want and still make excuses and reasons to not follow the rules. They’re meant to be broken, and that One, he’s going to lead the way.”
The four collectively began to file out of the room, Jacob first without a word, though Dreilide and Cleo came to stop beside Sam before they left.
“The Twos we’ve been working on together,” Cleo started, “…they’re done. If you could make sure he gets online, since I don’t think Ellen and Tory will let you scrap the line entirely, we’d be grateful.”
Sam nodded. “Just the way he is?”
Cleo glanced to Dreilide and they both raised their heads to nod in unison.
“We named the first one Leoben,” Dreilide said, and with that, they both stepped out of the room.
Nearly alone, Sam raised his eyes to look towards Eugenia. For two thousand years, he’d been alongside Saul and Ellen, Galen and Tyrol, having lost the woman he loved in the attacks on Earth. Though they’d been expecting it, and that was why the five of them had worked together in secret to restore the lost art of resurrection, the destruction had come far earlier than they’d planned for. He hadn’t yet found the time to start the process of creating bodies and a download signature for his significant other. She was gone. Eugenia, though, had been something of a surprise to him. For the last few years, he had found comfort in her, and though they’d never said it out loud, he was sure she felt the love for him that he felt for her. Their leaving hurt, but her going in particular was what stung him the worst.
“I’m sorry,” she offered and stepped nearer to him. “You should come with us. Even if it goes to hell out here, we can be normal for a little while.”
Sam considered it for a moment, but shook his head in the end. He loved her, but he couldn’t leave behind the others that had been his friends even before his first death. “I belong here.”
Hurt spread over her eyes and her features. She understood his loyalty, but couldn’t understand his misguided belief in what they were doing. Eugenia didn’t want to leave him, but she would. “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime.”
He forced a smile and nodded to her, his hand seeking out hers to squeeze it. “Maybe.”
She moved in, her tall and lean frame meaning she barely had to tilt her head up to press her lips against his, but it was short lived before she pulled back. If she allowed it to go any further, she was sure she wouldn’t go. “Be careful. I’ll see you on the other side, Samuel.”
“I’ll see you on the other side.”
-
Galactica, Orbiting Earth: Present
“Wait-wait! Please, I need to know first. Do you have Kara Thrace on board?”
It was as if the entire CIC collectively froze and set their eyes upon her. Kara’s insides cramped up at the response, sweat at her brow over the implications of what it could mean. With the type of day they had, she was fairing poorly enough, but to add onto it that an unknown ship they’d never heard of before, and seemingly not cylon in origin, had shown up and was now asking for her by name? No, it was too much.
She looked to Lee in a panic, finding it hard to breathe. It was like that day on Pegasus all over again, when the cylons had returned and she’d given in to her emotions and been unable to cope. Kara wanted to reach for Lee more than anything, he’d become a crutch for her as of late, but she felt guilt at it. He wasn’t hers anymore and she had made that decision herself once again. Her fingers curled over the edge of the table in the center of CIC to try to force her dizziness to subside, her eyes falling to the illuminated surface instead of everyone else around her.
Lee set his hand low on the small of Kara’s back and looked to his father. They had two ways of playing this. They could either admit the woman was here and hope that the other ship meant them no harm, but that also ran the risk of them having to hand Kara on over to them. The other option was to deny, deny, deny, with the risk that without having her on board, the ship wouldn’t simply blow them out of the sky. It was the Admiral’s call, but Lee pleaded with his eyes to his father. No, they said, please don’t make me give her up. His father knew none of what had happened down on Earth and Lee was having a hard time himself trying to fully make sense of it. They hadn’t stopped moving for the last few hours and his brain would need quite some time to come to terms. All he knew right now, though, was that he didn’t want to let her go, whatever she was.
Adama, still holding the comm in his hand, looked over to his daughter and his son, his eyes locked especially on the hand Lee held gently to her. It warmed and broke his heart just the same. Not only could Adama not give Kara up as a sacrifice for himself and the rest of the fleet, but he knew if he was forced to do so, Lee would be going with her this time. He covered over the mouthpiece of the phone and redirected his attention to Tigh. “Are the civilian ships ready to jump away?”
Tigh gave a solemn shake of his head. “Most of them, but Colonial One and Rising Star are reporting FTL problems and are trying to repair them right now.”
Laura had returned to her own ship after some of the events of the day to prepare for how to deal with the civilians in regards to all that had happened. He hadn’t wanted to see her go, especially not with how very sick she’d been as of late, but Roslin tended to do what she wanted. Now, if they left, he would have to leave her behind and like his decision about Kara, he wouldn’t do that. He’d rather go down fighting. He raised the comm to his mouth again before speaking.
“I am not aware that we have a woman by that name on any of our ships,” he lied, eyes on Kara the entire time.
There was silence on the other line and Dee instinctively checked to make sure the connection was still open. It was.
“Admiral,” the man said, frustration evident. “The fact that you are here right now tells me she’s with you.”
Kara looked over to Adama, chewing over her lower lip.
“You’ve still not identified yourself, Meridian. Who am I speaking with and where is your ship from?”
“This isn’t how it works. I need to speak to her first.”
“No, I’ll tell you how it works. You tell me who you are and why you’re looking for this person and I won’t continue to arm my nuclear warheads and aim them straight at your ship.” Adama raised his hand towards one of the crewmen, the one who had the important but rarely used job of being in constant control over the small supply of nukes they had left. The stand-off would begin. With any luck, the other ship’s radiological alarms, if they even had them, would be sounding now, letting them know just how serious things were. Bill looked to Tigh for a status update on the other ships, but his expression said it all. They needed to buy time.
“The Meridian is a science ship with a crew of twenty-three. We mean you no harm,” the voice reassured him, but it did little to calm the Admiral. “I know that if you’re here, it means something happened to the Twelve Colonies and you’re looking for Earth. I know that you found it and it isn’t what you expected, and this ship and myself, are your only hope of ever finding out what happened here. I also know my daughter is aboard one of your ships and brought you here. Now I need you to start trusting me and find her… I need to know she’s okay.”
Kara looked to the Admiral, shaking her head immediately in response to what the voice had claimed. “No, he’s lying. My father’s dead, we need to leave!” She insisted in a panic. “He died on Caprica with everyone else.” Only then did she think back to the copies of herself left burning in a field down on the planet below. Maybe she didn’t even have parents, maybe she had been given a story like all the others and only believed it to be real. Gods, why would someone have programmed her with the kind of childhood she had? Was it some kind of cruel cosmic joke? She thought about the things she could be sure of in her life. Zak, everything that started with Zak, she could be certain of. He had friends and family, most of which were standing around her right now, that knew her back then. Lee by default was her anchor now, because she had met him all those years ago, the only living person around her that truly knew she had existed back then.
“What is your name?” Adama asked.
“Dreilide. Dreilide Thrace.”
She shook her head again, brows furrowed in her pained expression as she watched the Admiral. All she had wanted her entire life was to hear her father’s voice again, to have him back in her life, to just have him tell her that he really had loved her and the words hadn’t been made empty with his departure. But this, she couldn’t believe. There was no way.
“Please,” the ominous voice pleaded.
Kara reached her hand out for the comm Adama held, and with hesitation, he finally handed it over. She swallowed hard, finding her mouth dry and her throat aching from the screaming she’d done earlier in the day. “This is Major Kara Thrace.”
“My God,” the voice lost all sense of control it held before. “Kara, I’ve waited for years.”
“You’re not my father,” she said, ignoring his own words. “He died on Caprica when the cylons attacked.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“There’s no way for him to be here. Stop lying to us, do you know what we’ve been through?” She asked, the pain of the last few years coming out as she spoke.
“Kara, I know things don’t make sense right now, but they will. We’ve been sent here to wait for you, for all of you, and offer you passage to safety should you ever arrive.” He stopped, presumably allowing time for his words to sink in to all those who listened. “Whatever your terms are, my team and I want to come on board and speak to you and your Admiral and whoever else is in charge.”
As many hang ups as she had regarding her parentage, or perhaps even lack thereof if it turned out it had all been fabricated, it wasn’t her call to make regarding the future of what remained of the human race. She wasn’t the Admiral or the President, she wasn’t even Commander anymore. Kara limply offered the phone back to the Admiral, overwhelmed and fading fast.
“This is the Admiral,” Adama said to clarify, as if her voice and his could ever be mistaken for one another’s. “Your ship is to remain where it is. We will send over a shuttle to pick you and a few others up. When it arrives, you’ll allow my people to search you and any belongings you intend to bring on board. If my people don’t check in as I dictate, we will fire upon your ship. Do you understand and agree?”
“We agree.”
-
Though what everyone really wanted to do was get some sleep, it didn’t seem like they would be lying down for that comfort anytime soon. Preparing the Raptor and its pilots and marine guards going on board had taken the better part of an hour once they’d gone through every precaution and regulation to be observed. Though it was clear the people on the ship weren’t outright associated with their enemy cylons, they knew it could very well be a trap. One couldn’t simply trust voices anymore. Though the person on the other end they’d talked to hadn’t sounded like any of the male cylons they knew, it wasn’t enough to believe it for fact. Then there were all the questions about who these people were if they indeed weren’t enemy cylon and weren’t from the Twelve Colonies. Were they what remained of the people from Earth or did they come from somewhere else entirely? All those questions and more meant that every protocol that had ever been written would be observed. There would be no mistakes or sloppiness tonight.
Laura stood alongside Bill, their contingent of marines behind them and ready to expect the worst. What they’d heard from Racetrack over the wireless had indicated no problems at all, and she hadn’t given the sly verbal signal worked out ahead of time to indicate any duress, but that didn’t mean all was well. Adama watched the cockpit, seeing the two pilots still bundled up in their flight suits and not reading any kind of additional stress in their body language. The guns of the marines around him raised as the door of the ship opened up, revealing the occupants inside. The Raptor had left with four people and now returned with seven, two women and a man, whom he assumed to be the one all communication had been done with over the phone. There was something about the women that unsettled him, something oddly familiar, though he couldn’t exactly place it and let it go.
The three of them climbed from the wing of the Raptor unsteadily, clearly the first time any of them had been on a vessel of that sort. They made no move to to approach those who waited for them, wisely choosing to keep back and speak when spoken to. Dreilide’s eyes took in his surroundings first, then shifted ahead to the sea of unfamiliar faces.
Roslin did her duty as ambassador, stepping forward and raising her hand weakly. “I’m Laura Roslin, President of the Colonies,” she said, and there was recognition of her position and power in the faces of the three guests. Each of them took her hand in turn, returning the gesture.
“Dreilide Thrace,” the man said. Though Roslin had heard all about what had happened, she still found it hard to believe what he claimed. Not only were the circumstances absolutely ridiculous, but he looked hardly older than Kara himself.
“Eugenia Odila,” the red haired woman said before gesturing to the third member of their party. “My sister, Cleo.”
Dreilide looked past the President to the man he could recognize as Admiral by his uniform and the pins at his collar. That had been something Socrata had taught him all those years ago. “Admiral, sir,” he started, his own hand raising preemptively in a casual greeting to the man before him.
Adama nodded his head and shook his hand, but didn’t bother to address him. The entire situation reeked and he had the feeling there were a lot of things they didn’t yet know. “We’ve prepared a place to talk.”
Dreilide nodded along with his companions, following the President and Admiral as they led the way. The marines that surrounded them didn’t do anything to make him feel any better, but it brought him an odd kind of comfort he hadn’t felt in decades now. One of the guards was female, her ponytail hanging out from underneath her helmet, and his brain immediately processed for what he wanted to see, thinking it blonde when in reality it was a deep brown shade. He’d hoped to see Kara standing on the deck when he arrived, though he had the sudden realization that he probably wouldn’t have even recognized her if she had been there. The last time he’d seen her in person, she’d been nothing but a child, and all the photographs he had of her preserved her that way. Now she was an adult, a woman, a completely different person from that he had left. She could have been a wife now, a mother, a million things, but the most important and significant of it all was that she was actually alive.
They arrived in a conference room, old and fairly empty. They weren’t the only ones there though, and this time, Dreilide instantly recognized the face in front of him. It was Saul Tigh, aged much further than he’d ever seen him, even during the years they’d spent together in the Colony. Like that night in the bar in Delphi, he wanted to go up to the man and greet him, but he knew just as it was back then, Saul didn’t recognize him. Beside him, Eugenia touched his arm as she found her eyes on their old friend as well, unable to believe that somehow, despite all that had clearly happened back in the Colonies, one of their acquaintances had made it through in the end.
With the exception of the marines, everyone sat at the table, though on opposite sides to clearly demonstrate the separation that existed between the two.
“I’m afraid we can’t offer you anything other than water,” Adama said.
“No, we’re all right.” Eugenia was speaking for the group. She couldn’t imagine what a fleet of this size was subsisting on and wasn’t truly interested in finding out. She turned her attention to Saul Tigh, seated directly across from her. “Do you really not know who we are?”
Her question startled him and he looked back to Bill as if searching for help in answering the question. “No. Should I?”
She nodded to him and leaned back in her chair. Though Dreilide had attested to this over two decades ago, seeing it for herself was something else. “You should, Saul. You should.”
“I didn’t tell you my name,” he said.
Dreilide answered for her. “You did, a long time ago.” He left it at that. There would be a time to get into it, but this second had more pressing matters. “We’ll answer whatever questions you have for us, Admiral, President, but I want to request I see Kara first.”
It was something they expected to be asked of, though they’d hoped for the best and sent Kara and Lee away from the deck on the off chance that they could prevent her from being pulled into it. “What reason do we have to trust that you are who you say you are?”
“I can tell she means a lot to you by the way you’re looking to protect her, but she’s going to want to hear everything we have to say here,” he said.
“Bill,” Laura prompted from beside him and he acquiesced.
With a look from the Admiral towards a marine at a door at the back of the room, the soldier knocked twice before opening the hatch. Dreilide watched in rapt attention for whomever would come through it, but it wasn’t his daughter, in fact it was a man with cropped brown hair and striking blue eyes. His face and body were stiff, and his expression alone made Dreilide uneasy to be in his presence. The man stepped aside, however, and a woman of similar height in an identical blue uniform came through behind him. Though he’d feared that he wouldn’t recognize her if she was standing in front of him, Dreilide knew her instantly. Without question, the woman with long blonde hair that reminded him so very much of his wife’s, was his daughter. This was Kara Thrace, finally grown up.
He’d dreamt of a reunion between him and her since the day he left her behind. In all of them, she was happy to see him and never angry. She would fit into his arms just like she did when she was a child and it would be like no time had passed. Kara would tell him about the life she had led in his absence, and though each time her life’s work changed, she was always happy. Her mother had done right by her despite the wrongs he’d committed against them both. Kara never stopped smiling in those idealic thoughts.
The reality of the confrontation was much different. She looked less like her mother than he thought she would, and in her features, he could read parts of himself. There wasn’t a smile over her lips, her expression kept tight and terse, and that part of her was definitely all Socrata. So she’d fallen into the military just like her mother, he shouldn’t have been surprised at it, but he was, regardless. Kara crossed the room and the man she was with followed beside her. She was doing her best to avoid looking directly at him, succeeding until she and the man sat down, with Kara sitting directly beside the Admiral and thus, nearly straight across from him. Their eyes met and he saw recognition flicker in her eyes, her steadiness faltering for a moment.
As much as she wanted to deny that this man wasn’t her father, she couldn’t. Maybe he was a copy or a trick, but he was a damn good one at that. He was exactly as she’d remembered, exactly as she’d last seen him in some of her photographs from the happier years of her childhood. The idea that time had preserved him perfectly was actually what bothered her the most, and before anyone else could get a word in, she opened her mouth to speak. “How are you here?” She asked, her voice betraying nothing.
Dreilide kept his eyes locked on his daughter’s own, another part he knew to be from Socrata and not from him. Her voice had expectedly changed too, no longer the high pitched sound he could still hear in his ears from years past. “I can’t answer that question without bringing up a million more. We need to start at the beginning.”
Adama reached forward to the sole object in the middle of the table, a device presumably used for recording. He hit a single button and nodded across the table to the unknown visitors.
“Two thousand years ago, our planet was nearly destroyed, along with the people on it. We created sentient lifeforms, like the ones you call cylons, and they rebelled against us. You’ve seen it, you know the devastation down there.”
“How did you survive?” Laura asked.
The woman known as Cleo spoke up, the first time since she arrived. “We felt the threat was coming and it was only a matter of time before the cylons finally and fully retaliated. As a result, different groups began to work on redeveloping resurrection technology-”
Adama stopped her. “We tested the remains of the people down on that planet. We know they were cylons.”
She nodded hesitantly, as if afraid of continuing. “When the Thirteenth Tribe left Kobol, our tribe was composed of humanoid cylons. Our ancestors left to find a place for themselves and they found the planet they named Earth. Back then, the only means of survival of our species was by resurrection. They designed new personalities and new bodies, created new people and gave them life to join the rest of us. A miracle happened along the way though, and they found that some couples were beginning to show signs of being able to reproduce organically. No longer was there a need for resurrection. We could finally have children like humans did, form our own families and take care of our own. We aged just like everyone else, and for the first time, everyone embraced the idea of death instead of looking to cheat it. They didn’t want to be cylons anymore, so they chose not to be.”
Dreilide took over when Cleo finished, trying to answer the original question posed to them. “We are cylons,” he admitted outright with his eyes on his daughter, showing he had no shame for what he was. “But I was born to a mother and a father, and they were born to parents, and theirs had parents as well. I was a baby, a child, I grew up. How does that make me any different than you? Because over two thousand years before I was born, your ancestors created mine, that means my people are less than you?” He wasn’t accusing them, as no one had even made a remark of that nature. At least not yet. He wasn’t fighting just for himself either, but also for his daughter to understand the nature of her heritage.
“You’re not dead though,” Roslin said. “You should be and you’re not.”
He nodded in acknowledgement. “I was part of one group that worked in bringing back resurrection as a means of survival for my people. It was a way to cheat death, but only done out of fear that we would cease to exist if our own cylons had their way. The destruction came earlier than we expected, though, and the facilities we were beginning to set up underground and out in space weren’t prepared to to take the downloads of millions. Only a little over over fifteen thousand were saved.” Though it had happened two millenia ago, the pain of everything and everyone lost in a single day was still fresh inside of him.
“You just had bodies lying around for everyone that would potentially need one?” Tigh asked.
“No, the technology we created was different than what you did.”
Tigh’s eye widened. “What?”
Eugenia shook her head and filled in the missing information. “You, Ellen and a few others were another group that were working on resurrection at the same time. Your idea went back to what we had when we left Kobol. Standard bodies that could accept preprogrammed personalities. The idea works, so long as you’ve already built a vessel to hold the person you need to put into it, but when you have millions of people who have been interbred for thousands of years, you don’t have a chance at saving everyone.”
“Ellen? My Ellen?”
“And Samuel, Galen, and Tory,” she finished. “But you wouldn’t remember them.”
“Eugenia, is it?” Laura said. “All of them, everyone you mentioned, they’re here on Galactica.”
Something flared in all three of the unknown guests at that mention. Billions of people had died and yet, the five people they’d spent years with back in the Colony had survived in the end. The chances of it were astronomical and unbelievable, and yet it had happened. “Do they remember anything?” Eugenia asked.
Tigh, being one of the five, took the time to answer for those absent. “No. Down on Earth, some of us remembered things about being there, but that’s it. We still don’t know anything about who we are or why we don’t remember.”
She thought of Sam immediately, though the knowledge that he wouldn’t be able to remember her face left an ache inside of her before she put herself back on task. She looked to her sister and then to Dreilide before looking across the table again. “Can we see them?”
“After we get finished here,” the Admiral said, still not ready to trust them. “How did you get to the Colonies?”
“The plan that our government had only begun to put into place before the attacks dictated that the survivors would move on to find a new home together. Some began to think that we owed it to the other tribes to go out and search of them, to find you and warn you about our mistakes so you didn’t suffer the same fate. They asked for volunteers and we, along with another man we left on our ship, Jacob, decided we would go. We followed the accounts we had of the Thirteenth Tribe leaving Kobol back to that planet and then started in the direction we knew the other tribes had left. Along the way, we realized we were following a fading heat signature of another ship, and only when we got to the Colonies, were we able to actually follow it to its end.”
“What did you find?” Tigh asked.
“You,” said Dreilide. “We didn’t have FTL technology when we left Earth, so we were forced to travel at sublight speeds the entire way. We arrived almost two years after another ship from Earth, and that ship was yours. The five of you, falsely assuming you were the only ones to make it off of Earth, headed back to find the other Twelve Tribes with the same intentions we had. You got there first, in the middle of the first cylon war in fact, and you and Ellen offered the centurions human-like bodies and resurrection in exchange for peace.” The more he talked about it, the more a small amount of anger seemed to come off of him.
Adama seemed to be hit the hardest by the revelation of what had really gone on those some fourty years ago. “No one ever really knew why the cylons left a war they seemed to be winning.”
Next to him, Tigh felt a stirring of guilt over something he had done. Something he had done that he couldn’t even remember. It was clear that whoever he had been before had good intentions behind what they did, but the consequences of it all had been even worse than what they tried to prevent.
“You and the centurions formed what you called the Colony and there, you’d already started the work of giving them resurrection. You were just beginning the process of creating new human looking cylons, a total of eight models.”
“Eight?” Roslin asked. “We’ve only ever seen seven, but we know them by their numbers. We have an Eight on board.”
“You have an Eight here?” Cleo asked.
“Yes, she defected to our side at the start of the attacks,” the President continued, leaving out the larger facts of Sharon Agathon’s life.
“The Eight was Galen’s,” Eugenia said. “We didn’t agree with what they were trying to do, but for awhile we agreed to help because the four of us didn’t know where else to go. Together, we laid out the ground work for who the other models would be and some of us chose to work on specific ones. Ellen made the Ones first, in the image of her father. Dreilide and Cleo made the Twos.”
Something horrifying awakened in both Kara’s face and the man that sat beside her. Dreilide wasn’t one to miss it, but he chose not to bring it up in the middle of the conference room.
“Samuel was working on the Sixes, myself the Threes,” she continued on. “You don’t happen to have photographs of them, do you?” It wasn’t necessary, but the curiosity of a proud parent inside her longed to see how their children had wound up in the end, especially after the four of them had abandoned their work.
“I’ll get them,” Lee said and stood to leave, but not before laying his hand against Kara’s shoulder, a sign of affection her father caught. He was only gone a minute before he returned, a folder in hand. Lee slid a few slips of paper across the table top and the three arranged them all in a row before them, putting them into their number orders as if that made it easier to process. Where number seven should have been, they left an empty space.
“You’ve never heard of a seventh model?” Dreilide asked and those across from him shook their heads.
“Up until this conversation, we just assumed one of us was the seventh,” Tigh clarified.
Eugenia kept her eyes on the photograph of the six model, unable to shake the image she saw. When she left the Colony with the others, Sam had only just begun work on programming the Sixth model. Who she would really be, what she would look like, none of that had been fleshed out yet. Staring at the photograph though, Eugenia saw similarities between her and the model that were far too many to just be a coincidence. She’d left Sam and he’d made that Six in something of her image. They couldn’t be mistaken for the same person, he hadn’t gotten her down that well, but to suggest that they were sisters wouldn’t have surprised anyone. She pushed the picture back into place.
“What we dont know,” Dreilide began, “Is what happened in the Colony after we left.”
Tigh’s single eye focused on him. “Why would you leave?”
“Because we’d gotten in too deep. We never agreed with what you did, and after Ellen brought the One online, we knew nothing good could come of it all. He could be helpful and kind, but there was something else underneath it all that we didn’t trust. She wouldn’t scrap him or rewrite him, and instead she started allowing him to help program the other models. When we left, we told all of you about what we feared would happen, that they wouldn’t ever be content where they were and they’d come back to the Colonies to take what they felt was theirs.”
“How do I fit into all of this?” Kara spoke, the first thing she’d said aloud since her initial question.
“We left the Colony, the four of us,” her father said, the pair of sisters allowing him to take the question. “All we wanted was to just disappear and find something for ourselves. I stayed on Caprica because of how much I saw Earth in it. I didn’t have anything when I got there, it wasn’t like there was work for a scientist who’d spent two thousand years perfecting resurrection technology for a non-human race of people.” His lips lifted into something of a smile, but his daughter stiffly didn’t return it. “So I did what I always wanted to do back on Earth. I played piano. Things were… simpler. I met your mother a few years after I’d been on Caprica, Kara.” Though there were others in the room, he spoke only to her. “On Earth, I’d never been married, I didn’t lose anyone other than my family when everything was destroyed. She was the only woman I’ve ever loved.”
Kara was torn about how to feel about the man in front of her. He was both familiar and not. Though he talked about things from her life, like the mother she sometimes wished she could forget, she still had a hard time believing that he was who he was saying he was. Worse, was that every word he said only confirmed things further for her. She wasn’t human. She was half-cylon, the first of her kind. She’d never been anything but half machine. She’d spent her life praying to the Gods, but had they ignored her pleas because she didn’t have a soul? Could someone have half of one? Did having a human mother grant her one just the same?
“We got married and after a few years, we had you. I never thought that we would be able-” he said, stopping himself as the emotion behind his daughter’s conception and birth came back to him. He kept himself together though, and continued on. “Human and cylon having a child together, that had never even been something anyone ever dreamt of, Kara. I don’t care what anyone believes, you existing at all is a miracle. The fact that you survived and you brought everyone here, only further proves it to me.”
“Stop,” she ordered him like he was one of her nuggets. “I’m not whatever you are. I’m not.” Though she’d seen evidence that confirmed his words, she didn’t want to believe it. She’d witnessed her own body laid out before her, twice, and now the appearance of her father on the other side of the universe, looking like hardly a day had passed since she’d seen him twenty years earlier, and yet she wanted to live in denial.
Dreilide silenced himself. Staring at his daughter was like seeing Socrata come to life all over again. The mannerisms they shared was absolutely uncanny.
Bill looked to the woman he considered his daughter beside him, the daughter he was realizing actually had a father of her own. He felt jealousy brewing inside at the notion that this man could simply find them, quite literally in the middle of nowhere, and expect to be able to claim Kara as his own. As for what Dreilide was saying and the implications it made for what Kara truly was, he was surprised at how little it bothered him in the end. Maybe in a clearer head, he wouldn’t feel the same, but sitting next to her at that table, she was his daughter and nothing less. “How did you get out here then, if you were on Caprica?”
Kara’s father took his eyes off of her reluctantly, looking back to the Admiral. He swallowed and nodded, returning his focus. “I saw Saul and Ellen Tigh one day on Caprica, but when I approached them, they didn’t know me. I knew that as much as I disagreed with their decisions, they would never have allowed copies to be made of themselves or chosen to wipe their own memories. What it meant was that the Colony no longer belonged to them any longer and it would only be a matter of time before the centurions and whoever was leading them came back.”
“When we all split up,” Eugenia began,”we agreed that if something should ever happen and we became aware of it, we would begin the journey back towards Earth and where we knew our people had headed.”
Roslin’s head shook vehemently. “How could you just leave everyone to die? Why didn’t you warn us?”
“And say what?” Eugenia bit out. “Who would believe us? If they even were able to confirm that we weren’t human in nature, they’d just accuse us of being the enemy. We didn’t have any idea of what the cylons were planning, just that they could be planning something. We weren’t left with a lot of choices.”
“So you just left billions to die with nowhere to go?” She accused the three cylons.
“No,” Dreilide responded with some of his own rage. “I left you my daughter. Do you know how much it killed me to leave her behind? I left her so you would have a chance of making it here some day. And she did it, didn’t she? Tell me she isn’t the reason you found Earth.” His voice raised and he was only a shadow of the soft spoken man he’d been a moment before. Everyone sat in silence and as the seconds passed, Dreilide began to feel regretful over the attitude he’d taken with them.
“Maybe it’s time we take a break,” Lee said, eyes shifting to search over each and every face around him. Though he had concern for his father and Roslin, his biggest worry was what was working through Kara after all the revelations of the day.
Adama deferred to his son’s judgement and stood from his seat. “We’ll reconvene in the morning.”
Kara was the first person to rush out of the room, like there was a fire behind her she was fleeing from. Dreilide felt physical pain at her absence and the touch to his arm by Cleo brought him back.
“Give her time, Dreilide.”
He didn’t respond to her, his vision instead lingering on the doorway she’d left through until the marines led them out and to their quarters for the night.